Battle of Flowers

After the dark days earlier in the week some flowers.

'All autumn Mrs. Parmenter had run out between the showers and picked the asters, saying brightly that an old woman must be allowed to do something around the house. Opposition would hardly have been hysterical if she had offered to make the beds, but her tastes appeared to be floral. Now it was January and the snowdrops, and before you knew where you were, Mrs. Ramsay thought morbidly, it would be May and the tulips. Somehow she had never expected to spend the war having a Battle of Flowers with Mrs. Parmenter.' Mollie Panter-Downes Mrs Ramsay's War in Good Evening, Mrs Craven

tulips

Not quite sure what a Battle of Flowers would look like but in some ways I like the sound of it. Which flower would win?

sad Andromache

Yes the boxes of school files keeps coming. Scribbled in the corner of an 'A' Level Classical Civilization file was this poem. I remember it and so am now storing it here for safe keeping.

Parting in war time Frances Cornford

How long ago Hector took off his plume,

Not wanting that his little sons should cry

Then kissed his sad Andromache goodbye -

And now we three in Euston waiting room.

goodbye

Seed of goodness

'But for war to be won without a winner, to be lost without a loser, how is this to be understood? How, except it be clearly seen who is the enemy? Who is the worst enemy all men must fight till the victory without a vanquished be won? To ask that little question is to see the answer. The worst enemy every man must fight is himself! ...It comes to a question,'....'of whether there is enough of what we are calling kindness left in the hearts of men to triumph at last and for always over brutality, greed, cruelty. ...And yet in every man is there this seed of goodness, in every man the free will to choose what he will be, what he will do. Not once, but a thousand times win or lose the war against himself.' Jocelyn Playfair A House in the Country

poppies

FlarePath

Very early on whilst watching the play Flarepath last week a thought struck me...

Here was war written by a man, with men waiting to go to battle and all their thoughts and feelings. I reflected that most of the books I read tend to be about the women who are long term left behind by their husbands and their thoughts and feelings. I don't really read about the side of war that is portrayed in Flarepath. Visiting your husband, waiting for him to come back from the latest RAF mission. The tension. How the men cope with this day to day, every day.

It's an unfinished thought but did the men who were fighting write poetry - it's more immediate can be written on a scrap of paper. The women books - longer as they had longer to explore their feelings.
Please help me finish this thought - by sharing yours.

Women and the War

Having had Virago Reading Week and Persephone Reading Weekend so far this year and Tuesday being International Women's Day. A passage about Women, home and wartime from A House in the Country, by the ever wise Tori.

"Everyone speaks of the test of war, which takes many different forms. For women there is the test of courage, to go with men into danger, bear hardship and discomfort, to work all days in factories, to be tired and perhaps afraid. But for me I think that to stay at home, to be unnoticed, to do the same things, to be bored, to be tired by work which no one sees, to live in the same way that you have always lived, with only the difference that it is upon you that all the work will now fall, there, I think, is the most severe test of all." Jocelyn Playfair A House in the Country

Birdsong

'No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand. When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them. We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings. We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.' Sebastian Faulks Birdsong

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It doesn't seem quite right to be celebrating all the great literature about France without mentioning the wars. This passage spoke to me years ago when I read Birdsong. It speaks even more having been to Ypres on a freezing November weekend.